Theodore Roszak

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Theodore Roszak, American historian and social critic (born Nov. 15, 1933, Chicago, Ill.—died July 5, 2011, Berkeley, Calif.), provided incisive commentary on American cultural movements and coined the term counterculture in his seminal book The Making of a Counter Culture: Reflections on the Technocratic Society and Its Youthful Opposition (1969). Roszak, who studied history at the University of California, Los Angeles (B.A., 1955), and Princeton University (Ph.D., 1958), was a longtime professor of history (1963–98) at California State University, East Bay. A self-proclaimed “neo-Luddite,” he advocated reconnection with nature in more than a dozen books, which include Where the Wasteland Ends: Politics and Transcendence in Postindustrial Society (1972), The Cult of Information: The Folklore of Computers and the True Art of Thinking (1986), The Voice of the Earth: An Exploration of Ecopsychology (1992), and—after having followed the baby-boom generation through four decades—The Making of an Elder Culture: Reflections on the Future of America’s Most Audacious Generation (2009). He also wrote six novels, notably Flicker (1991), The Memoirs of Elizabeth Frankenstein (1995), and The Devil and Daniel Silverman (2003).